The Value of Water
Thomas W. Carey
Water might be the most fundamental ingredient necessary to sustain all life. Humans have known this for millennia, and yet it's a well-known fact today that many people have limited or no access to a source of clean water. Concepts such as people walking many miles to the nearest available water source are known by almost everyone, as is the fact that there are numerous charities and other such initiatives to try and make water more accessible to more people across the world. While these issues are more prevalent in countries that are still recovering from the effects of colonialism and are thus less economically developed, there are places and people all over the world that suffer from the effects of unclean water. An example of this in the United States of America is the city of Flint, Michigan, in which a federal emergency was notably declared in 2016 due to many residents not having access to clean water1, but no significant action was taken in the years that followed. Despite this, those who have access to clean water generally treat it as an essentially free resource, often using it to excess and wasting it, not valuing it as the lifesaving resource it is for so many communities who are often very close to them both geographically and spiritually. This paper explores some potential solutions to this inequality, how effective they've been, and how much this whole issue is just another of many by-products of obscene wealth inequality and apathy by those with the economic and political power to improve the living standards and ultimately save the lives of countless humans.
Because of its ubiquity and importance, water is seen as special or sacred in almost every culture and religion. For example, most denominations of Christianity have some concept of holy water, which is used to bless people and repel evil from places and inanimate objects2. The concept of amrita, a word which literally translates to 'immortality' and has the same root as the nectar ambrosia, is important in many South Asian religions; including Hinduism, whose practitioners view the river Ganges as the holiest of all bodies of water3; Sikhism, wherein Amrit Sanchar is a ceremony to initiate one into the Khalsa, the community of Sikhs, by drinking sweetened water4; and multiple denominations of Buddhism, where the world has been sprinkled with this nectar by the Blessed One and thus been set free of various ailments5. In Islam, the Well of Zamzam located next to the Kaaba is a source of water said to have been revealed by God to the prophet Isma’il, which millions of Muslims drink water from every year, regardless of whether or not they actually visit the well6. Aside from this, almost every faith - and secular cult - through history has incorporated some form of ablution or ritual washing.
There has been importance placed on water for as long as there has been civilisation. However, as of 2008, 780 million people did not have access to a water source, while 2.5 billion lacked adequate sanitation7 – and these figures have gotten larger in the decade since. A Millennium Development Goal set by the United Nations aimed to have these figures at 790 million and 1.8 billion respectively, still 11% and 25% respectively of the world’s population, by 2015 – and this did not even come close to being attained8. This is not an unknown problem, as mentioned in the introduction – plenty of charities exist to try and lower these and related figures. One of the largest such charities is WaterAid, which put 67.6 million GBP (84.6 million USD) of the 91.4 million GBP (114.3 million USD) it made in 2018-2019 towards deliveri ng services to make change happen – including providing clean water sources and access to sanitation to 321,000 people and 442,000 people respectively near their homes, and reaching over a million people through behaviour change activities which encourage better hygiene to prevent the spread of water borne diseases9. This makes a significant difference towards the quality of many people’s lives, and is definitely very important work, but the number of people such charities provide with access to clean water and sanitation every year is less than the increase per year in number of people who still do not have access to these essential services, so at the current rate of change the problem worsens.
This is seen by many as the best that can be done, and is obviously much better than if nothing were done at all, but the power to solve and not just slow this worsening inequality lies interconnected with many similarly large issues, as most global issues tend to be in the modern era. Consider again the city of Flint, Michigan in the USA. In December 2014, the city’s water source was changed from the Detroit River and Lake Huron to the Flint River, which had not had corrosion inhibitors applied to it10. This meant that old and breaking down lead piping caused toxic and potentially lethal levels of the heavy metal neurotoxin to enter the stream of drinking water, which caused many illnesses, disabilities and deaths11. Another contributing factor is the fact that the city has a lot of residents close to or below the poverty line, who had their water shut off due to not being able to afford it. Companies that sold bottles of clean drinking water started inflating the prices in the city, while cutting services that delivered free bottled water to the affected citizens, so many residents (including 12,000 children) had no choice but to drink the heavily contaminated water12. In 2016, the Flint water crisis was declared a federal state of emergency1. Some work was being done to replace the pipes, but the predicted finish date kept being postponed and as of the time of writing has not yet been completed.
As is often the case when part of the USA experiences an issue that is common in other parts of the world, the plight of Flint has gained a lot more awareness, especially proportionally to the population of people in the area without access to clean water, than places which have had similar issues for much longer in other parts of the world, especially in Southern and Eastern Asia and Africa, and it is one city compared to large portions of major continents, but nevertheless the solution can be extrapolated. Due to the outbreak of the novel coronavirus COVID-19, the government responsible for the city restored affordable access to clean water to all households in Flint in early 2020 in an attempt to prevent residents from catching the virus13. This has effectively (albeit temporarily) solved the crisis that the city had been facing for years, at a completely negligible cost to those providing the essential service. As with all major modern issues, the same pattern is being repeated in other fields – for instance, many cities are housing their homeless population as a response to the virus yet would claim such a thing was impossible beforehand.
Systemic and societal changes, then seems to be where the solution, rather than a delay tactic, lies. WaterAid and other such charities and organisations are aware of this, with much of their expenditure going towards educating people in places such as Africa and Southern Asia about the importance of good hygiene, water conservation, and creating resources such as wells, pumps and toilets. Their 2018-19 report states that they developed a micro-financing model in Bangladesh to help 2,214 people learn to build and renovate toilets and thus generate extra income for things such as hand washing stations. The last two points of this are key – renovation makes the system sustainable and renewable so that it can continue without the direct help of the organisation, and generating extra income will allow them to do some work while leaving the organisation to put the saved funds somewhere else, and grow the system, thus spreading the word and practice of hygiene and sanitation – teaching them to fish, as it were.
While teaching the people most directly affected by lack of adequate sources of clean water and sanitation how to sustain the sources and equipment they have been introduced to will ensure that their communities are protected from the effects of having too little safely drinkable water for far longer than if they had just been presented with them without any knowledge of how they work, there still needs to be more done for long term sustainability, especially as the effects of climate change worsen. According to the World Water Council, issues stemming from inadequate water access lead to 675,000 premature deaths every year (as of 2015), and the worst affected countries have losses of up to 10% of their GDP14. However, it is estimated that due to population growth (which causes increased urbanisation and demand for food) and climate change the amount of money needed to solve these issues globally will triple by 203014. Because of this, the effects of any shortcomings in the present will be greatly worsened in the future, so sustainable solutions that maximise water security are being investigated. Population growth and climate change cause a range of issues in other sectors such as food and energy as well, and more collaboration between experts in these different sectors is occurring to find solutions that will help combat as many different effects of these issues as possible, often trying to make simpler, more affordable versions of systems that have existed for decades and are ubiquitous in places that are suffering the least from these issues, and thus the most apathetic towards them. These systems must be built to cope with the varying geographical profile of the areas of the world in which they are set to be implemented. The OECD Environmental Outlook to 2050 estimates that by 2050, 40% of the global population will be living in river basins under severe water stress, and 20% in places that are at risk of flooding14. All these issues need to be accounted for when designing systems that perform the function of wells and sanitation systems.
In some places, modern sanitation is not currently (if at all) feasible. This can be due to a number of different reasons (or a combination thereof), a common one being a community that is located near a lake or other body of water that currently cannot dispose of waste (both garbage and human waste matter) by any method other than dumping it directly in the lake. This is often exacerbated by the effects of tourism – tourists who do not live in the region are less likely to care about the effects of disposing of waste in the lake, and also the pollutants that occur in the construction and operation of accommodation and activities on the lake for the tourists are more than likely to directly end up in the lake15.
One example of this is Inle Lake in the Shan region of central Myanmar. Inle Lake is a popular tourist destination, and its popularity is only increasing, but it is also home to over 400,000 people, 70,000 of which live directly on the water. Over a quarter of the population lives below the poverty line, with many more just above, so the lake is the primary and, in some cases, sole water source for most of the local population. While the above effects of tourism are having a huge negative impact on the quality and cleanliness of the water in the lake, the population itself cause a lot of damage with more modern technology that has recently been adapted by many of the locals, where the harmful side effects are being ignored, not fully realised or deliberately withheld from the locals by the people who sold them this technology15. This includes the pesticides that run off the tomato farms ending up in the lake, as well as damage to the ecosystem caused by overfishing and the use of (illegal) battery shock methods to catch fish. Invasive species are also introduced by fish farming, on top of those brought in by tourists. Finally, the lake also suffers from the effects of no sewage system and a growing population causing increasing levels of (untreated) human waste, which has nowhere to go but the lake, and the natural effects of decreasing water levels due to increasing sedimentation and climate change. The effects of this on the local population follow directly from all of this. The health of whatever fish remain is much poorer, and these fish are a staple source of both food and income for the local villagers. Eating these fish can transfer bacteria such as E. coli from the wastewater to the humans, causing life-threatening diseases such as dysentery and cholera16.
Similar situations are seen in many places across the globe. Many people have set about finding solutions to some or all of these problems, each one coming with its own advantages and disadvantages and thus being more or less effective depending on the geography, both physical and human, of the area in which it is set to be implemented. One such solution is the bio tank, which has become especially popular in India in recent years. This has many variations, but the basic idea is that it is a tank that contains certain bacteria which digest the incoming human waste, leaving two products that can be re-used for agriculture: sludge that can be used to fertilise plants, and treated water that can be used for irrigation. The main drawback of this is that they are relatively expensive to implement, costing about 200 USD each. For comparison, the average daily income of a villager living around Inle Lake is about 1 USD, so this is not affordable for most of them. Another potential solution is DEWATS, an acronym and umbrella term for decentralised waste water treatment systems, which usually take the form of a large and easily maintainable tank that takes advantage of sedimentation to treat the water, and is able to grow plants on the surface using the waste for a more aesthetically pleasing solution17. Because of all these factors, they are ideal for buildings used by large numbers of people such as schools, hospitals, hotels or monasteries, where they are generally implemented, but not so much for individual households, especially floating ones, due to their large size and cost.
A solution that is both cheaper and more suited to people living directly on a lake as opposed to around it is the HandyPod, pioneered by WaterAid partner company ‘Wetlands Work!’, which has seen moderate success in many rivers and lakes in Cambodia, including the largest freshwater lake in Asia, the Tonlé Sap Lake, which as a growing tourist destination itself is facing many of the same problems that Inle Lake has. Floating villages are especially common in the country, with between 25% and 45% of Cambodia’s population living in these and similar ‘challenging environments’18, but they are becoming more widespread across most of southern Asia and even parts of Africa, mainly due to the migration of people too poor to afford to own land. The HandyPod is a device resembling a child’s paddling pool with a floating garden of water hyacinth (a plant native to most ecosystems in which these pods are being introduced) inside it. A standard squat toilet connects to a drum in which the incoming waste goes through anaerobic processes. The naturally processed waste is then passed to a nearby HandyPod, where the roots of the water hyacinth break down the waste before the much more hygienic broken-down waste enters the lake18.
These are a significantly cheaper solution than most solutions that have been tried, with each one costing around 30 USD and being able to serve multiple households, as well as being preferred by women due to the extra privacy it allows for. The main inherent difficulty appears to be maintaining the specific bacteria in the HandyPod, which may be difficult to locals who have not encountered such a thing before. On top of this, implementing this into local communities suffers from the same issues seen all over the world when something new is introduced to a community which is intended to benefit from it – first of all, educating the locals about the operation, manufacture and maintenance of the new system they will be unfamiliar with, but, more fundamentally, convincing them to use, manufacture and maintain the new system19. This requires not only educating them on the environmental issues caused by the current methods and how they impact their lives directly, but also how the new method will help combat these issues, which can be a challenging task if they don’t know anything about concepts like bacteria, or do not see the connection between, for example, defecating in the lake and the health issues faced by fellow villagers. Many people from all cultures across the globe who have used one system all their lives will be extremely reluctant to change, especially if they perceive the new system to be inferior in some way (in this example, they may argue that paying for the HandyPods is a waste of money when defecating in the lake is free and does not require any special equipment or education), and will understandably be sceptical about accepting help by an outsider, someone they have not met, who does not live in the area and has not experienced the issues first hand that they are claiming to help the locals with. This issue becomes one of gaining the trust of the locals and teaching them how to maintain the system for themselves. It is a phenomenon seen frequently that when a something new is given to a community by an outsider, it is generally abandoned fairly quickly, but if it is built by the local community they will have more of an attachment towards it and are much more likely to use and maintain the new system. All this applies in the case of the HandyPods – creating the system is only the first step, a difficult challenge is working together with the local people so that they can spread the knowledge about the pods across the lake’s communities and convince people to use them. Wetlands Work! have thought about these issues, doing research into local businesses and the behaviour of their customers, and getting involved in Cambodia’s plan to deliver universal access to clean water, sanitation and hygiene. WaterAid has helped found a Sanitation in Challenging Environments initiative, a goal of which is to get the solutions they have practical experience of implemented by the Cambodian government18.
Implementing the solutions also requires some adaptability and readiness to deal with issues that may arise due to any number of reasons, including change in environmental and weather conditions, the decreased stability to the locals’ lives this causes and the increased resistance to change of the locals in this situation. For example, after the HandyPods were first introduced in 2015, the El Niño drought and the increased number of dams on the river Mekong, a tributary of Tonlé Sap Lake, caused water levels in the lake to fall to record lows and thus required some of the floating houses to move to land, many for the first time ever20. This not only affected some areas where HandyPods could no longer be placed due to the lack of water, but also these effects led to low levels of fish, which led to lower levels of income for the villagers that year. Because of this, villagers were much more resistant to the idea of spending money on the pods. A new prototype of the HandyPod was constructed which was not only amphibious so didn’t necessarily need placing on water, but also offered increased durability and resistance to extreme weather such as storms19. To combat the issue of affordability, it was made easier to build and maintain than the previous version, and the new design had a longer lifespan. Wetlands Work! also partnered with local savings groups that allowed residents to pay for the pods in instalments and found a local company to manufacture all the necessary parts in Cambodia’s capital Phnom Penh19.
The main issue, changing the culture of local society so that people would actually want to pay for and use these devices, still remained, and to do that it was necessary to look at what had failed in the past introduction methods of other similar systems. They could not be given away to every household as people might then not see them as a product that needed paying for, they could not give them to certain groups within the community as that might create conflict between various community groups, and they could not give them to only the poorest members of the local society to avoid them being seen as a sign of low status. An approach they chose was a set of ‘sanitation raffles’ in each local community, where HandyPods were given as the top prize in a set of prizes that included soap, toothpaste and other hygiene products19. However, none of this is fully sustainable, and again the best-known practical solution to keeping use of these pods going in the long term is through education. The pods were introduced in schools and lessons were given to the children not only on use of the pods specifically but also on hygiene in general, in the hope that these messages would be relayed to other members of the communities in which they lived19.
Whether or not people know it, not having a reliable source of clean water has many knock-on effects that ultimately lead to loss of income and loss of life. Over 80% of disease in ‘developing’ countries – those who have been the victims of the exploitation that ‘developed’ countries have enjoyed the spoils of – is related to poor drinking water, hygiene and sanitation, which leads to 4,500 children dying due to related preventable diseases every day21. It is estimated that providing adequate clean water and nothing else globally would save 2 million lives a year. Additionally, there are many more effects to people’s livelihoods – for instance, the very limited water sources in sub-Saharan Africa is the main cause of the rapid growth of the number of people living in slums21. Education is paramount not only to sustaining water sources but also to the growth of a country economically, and poor access to clean water and sanitation lowers school attendance for a number of reasons, including disease and the fact that children are often sent to the nearest water source to fetch water, which can take many hours21. Because of this, studies have shown that every dollar invested in better access to water generates eight dollars in productivity gains, and that every year of school attended increases a person’s salary by 10%, which benefits the GDP of their country21. Other forms of inequality can and frequently do exacerbate these issues. Because of sexist societal structures, women are usually the people made to walk for hours fetch and carry heavy jugs of water, which can lead to chronic fatigue and disfigurement of the spine and pelvis, causing reproductive issues and more miscarriages21. Also, they have less opportunities to attend school since they are expected to perform other tasks, causing significant losses to their country’s GDP every year. When women do not have to walk miles to fetch water, their school enrolment increases by 15%21. Having more educated women in a society reduces poverty, diseases such as HIV/AIDS and the effects of this, practices such as female genital mutilation, and helps empower women and helps reduce many other effects of sexism21. Similarly, economic racism has been identified as the main reason why the USA did so little both to prevent and to handle the situation in Flint, Michigan22 – all over the world, prejudice breeds inequality which harms whole populations.
Ultimately, every initiative, whether it is to sanitise water or give access to water to those who do not have any, seems to have the same limiting factor despite the fact these are almost opposite problems. This is also seen in every other sector of improving the lives of those most affected by the lack of a resource taken for granted and wasted by those who can afford to – money. A study by Drop In The Bucket, a non-profit organisation that primarily focuses on building wells and sanitation systems in Africa to improve education, presents a UN estimate that an additional 30 billion USD would be required to provide access to safely drinkable water to the entire planet. Not only is this a third of the world’s expenditure on bottled water21 – it is also less than the net worth of some individual people, many of whom give amounts of money to such organisations that seem large but are tiny fractions of what they have – much less than the fraction of their income that the average person who buys bottled water spends on it. The root of this and so many other problems is how to stop this greed and apathy – and the idolisation of those at the heart of it.
References:
2 - http://anglicanhistory.org/usa/ignatius/principles3.html
4 - https://www.sikhmissionarysociety.org/sms/smspublications/amritkihain/chapter4/
5 - https://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/horner/bl130.html
7 - https://www.cdc.gov/healthywater/global/wash_statistics.html
9 - https://www.wateraid.org/uk/our-annual-reports
11 - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4985856/
12- https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/apr/04/flint-residents-punished-poisoned-water
13 - https://www.michiganradio.org/post/detroit-unveils-water-restart-plan-because-coronavirus-threat
16 - https://www2.irrawaddy.com/article.php?art_id=23172
17 - https://wedc-knowledge.lboro.ac.uk/resources/books/DEWATS_-_Chapter_03.pdf
18 - https://washmatters.wateraid.org/blog/the-handypod-sanitation-for-floating-communities-in-cambodia
